Items tagged with photography

Apple never neglects to mention whatever improved optics are in the latest iPhone during each and every iPhone launch event, and it's never just lip service -- the rear-cameras on last few iPhone releases have been quite good. Even with that being the case, however, we find it a tad surprising that iPhone devices ranked as the second most popular camera on Flickr last year, Yahoo's popular photo storage and sharing site.In a ranking of the top overall camera brands on Flickr in 2014, Apple shoved aside Nikon to take the second place spot by accounting for 9.6 percent of the photos that appear on...Read more...

An association of hackers known as Chaos Computer Club has found a way to reproduce fingerprints by using just a couple of photos of someone's fingers. The group explained its method at the 31st annual Chaos Computer Club convention in Hamburg, Germany, using the thumbprint of German Defense Minister Ursula von der Leyen as an example. This is an interesting development, as lifting fingerprints no longer requires that a person touch a physical object. Instead, hackers who use this technology can virtually swipe someone's fingerprints at public gatherings just by using a standard photo camera. Image...Read more...

Imagine of the horror of being Justin Bieber and waking up to find that your Instagram fan base has diminished by 3.5 million followers overnight, or 15 percent. Talk about a feeling of loneliness in your sprawling mansion! Except of course for the multiple housekeepers and entourage, but otherwise, how horrific, right? It wasn't just the pop singer who lost scores of followers, either. In an effort to purge spammers, Instagram wiped out millions of fake accounts, causing celebrities to lose a significant amount of their fan base.According to Business Insider, rapper Mase went from 1.6 million...Read more...

Having trouble taking good looking photos with your smartphone or tablet? So do a lot of people, though that hasn't stopped the majority from posting their snapshots to Facebook anyway. Ah, but don't be surprised if the quality of pictures on the world's largest social playground starts to improve. Why? Apparently Facebook has decided to do its users a solid by auto-enhancing newly updated pictures.The social networking site told TechCrunch that this new feature has already begun, though currently it only applies to users who upload photos from an iOS device -- Android support is coming soon. For...Read more...

Instagram started off as a simple idea, and though it's grown in capabilities over time, it still at heart a photo (and video) sharing app. There's a certain charm in its simplicity, which is why it's not hard to believe that there are now more than 300 million people using Instagram who collectively share tens of millions of photos and videos each and every day. "Over the past four years, what began as two friends with a dream has grown into a global community that shares more than 70 million photos and videos each day. Instagram is home to creativity in all of its forms, a place where you...Read more...

Adding to the pile of awesome already heaped onto Amazon Prime memberships, the e-tailer this week introduced Prime Photos, which is yet another tantalizing benefit for Prime subscribers. In this case, Prime Photos provides free unlimited photo storage in Amazon Cloud Drive, so the only restrictions you have to worry about are those imposed by your ISP. "This time of year in particular, families are capturing thousands of photos of holiday parties, family gatherings and opening presents," said Greg Greeley, Vice President Amazon Prime. "With free unlimited photo storage, we’re providing one...Read more...

For whatever reason, smartphone makers have a tendency to neglect the front-facing camera in favor of a much superior rear-facing lens even though there exists an obsession with taking selfies. Heck, not even the threat of being mauled by a bear (literally) is enough to deter the selfie craze. However, there's one company that gets it, and that company is Oppo, which has gone and motorized the rotating camera on its new N3 handset. The company's previous N1 smartphone had a rotating camera as well -- turn the rear-lens around and take a selfie using a high quality camera -- but this time around...Read more...

Are you ready for your facepalm moment of the week, and perhaps the year? Bear selfies are now a thing on social media. Not only are tourists taking selfies with bears in the background, but it's happening so frequently at South Lake Tahoe that officials with the U.S. Forest Service have had to issue a warning against doing it. "People have been rushing up to the bears to take selfies and videos with them," Lisa Herron, a public affairs officer for the Lake Tahoe Basin Management Unit, told Mashable. "A bear will come and whole mobs of people will charge up to them to take photos. Just hangin with...Read more...

A million dollars isn't cool, do you know what's cool? A billion dollars. Or so we were told by Justin Timberlake's portrayal of Sean Parker in the movie The Social Network, a docu-drama about Facebook. Ironically enough, Facebook reportedly offered $1 billion to acquire Snapchat, and then $3 billion after its initial bid was rebuked. It was pretty gutsy of Snapchat to turn down both offers without having any real revenue stream to speak of, along with a $4 billion offer from Google, though the lack of revenue is about to change with the introduction of ads. Beginning this weekend, Snapchat will...Read more...

It's no guarantee that today's fads won't fizzle out tomorrow, especially in the rapidly evolving mobile space. That being the case, Snapchat took a monumental gamble by turning down two lucrative buyout offers by Facebook, one for $1 billion and a second one for $3 billion. Time will tell if those were wise decisions, but in the meantime, Snapchat's development team continues to find ways to keep its users engaged, most recently by adding geofilters. "We’ve had a lot of fun drawing up new filters for special locations in Los Angeles and New York. Swipe right on the preview screen to check...Read more...

Have you been patiently waiting for Nikon to update its medium-format D800 DSLR? After roughly two years, your patience is being rewarded with Nikon's new D810 DSLR. If it's a high level of detail you're after, the D810's 36.3-megapixel, full-frame FX-format (7360x4912 resolution) CMOS sensor aided by Nikon's EXPEED 4 imaging processing engine should have no trouble delivering it. "Once a user experiences the intense level of fine detail they are able to render using the immersive resolution of the D810, it will be hard to imagine a project without it," said Masahiro Horie, Director of Marketing...Read more...

Organizing your collection of digital photos is often a chore, though it doesn't have to be. There are services intended to make photo management a lot easier, including a new one by Canon. It's called Irista and it's essentially a digital image storage center in the cloud to take the place of Dropbox, Google Drive, and other similar cloud-based services. Unlike those others, however, Irista is solely intended for photographs (JPEG and RAW) -- you can't store Word documents in Irista, for example. On the flip side, by focusing on photos, Canon is able to offer some compelling features, such as...Read more...

After spending $1 billion acquiring the service, it would be pretty silly for Facebook to let Instagram grow stagnant. You needn't worry about that if you're an Instagram user -- effectively immediately, you now have more creative tools to play around with, which apply to both Android and iOS users. These include the ability to adjust brightness, contrast, saturation, warmth, and more. Once you've installed the new version, you'll find the expanded tools by tapping the wrench icon, which you'll see when selecting a filter. This will bring up a tray of photo editing tools, such as the ones mentioned...Read more...

A big shout out goes to Amazon for forever changing the way we think about photography. You see, Amazon was recently granted a patent that, in short, describes taking photos of subjects and/or or objects against a white background. Brilliant! Wait, what's that? Photographers far and wide have long known about this technique and used it extensively in the past? Well, that changes things -- give a huge shout out to Amazon's legal team for somehow wording the patent application in such a way that the USPTO thought this was a brand new idea worthy of patent No. 8,676,045. "A subject can be photographed...Read more...